My husband and I are currently moving and he is, unfortunately, often traveling for business. This presents some challenges as there are many things to do and he is only here occasionally to help. In a recent late night conversation over the phone he asked if I had put up Christmas lights yet. Silly me–all along I thought the most important thing was to have everything moved out of our old place and cleaned by the deadline and he just wanted me to put up Christmas lights. Sigh.

Just as in life’s events there are often things that must be done and some that would just be nice, so too there is a necessary order in our genealogical and historical research. This order depends on our end goal. Particularly if you are working with a professional researcher, knowing and communicating your end goal to them can save you and them a lot of time and frustration. But knowing the end goal is not always enough if your end goal is something like “I want to move to a new house” or “I want my family tree.” When you have a lot of goals or a broad end goal, you will need to set additional boundaries. Smaller goals act as milestones on the road to your larger end goal and help to establish more exactly what you want someone else to do and accomplish for you. This is true also for setting boundaries on the simpler sounding goals as well.

As an example of a broad goal, someone might tell me they want a copy of their family tree to give to their children as a Christmas present this year. Instantly, a thousand questions come to my mind about what their goal might actually entail and what it is they really want. Do they already have information and they simply want it put into a nice wall size chart format? Do they need us to research their family tree to get the information to put in a nice wall size chart? Do they want a book with their family history instead of a wall chart? Do they want only names and dates of their ancestors or do they want stories, pictures, and copies of documents that pertain to each ancestor? How much time and how much money are they interested in spending on this project? How many generations do they envision being able to display or include? The questions go on and on and certain answers dictate what is necessary, possible, probable, or what may be like hanging Christmas lights when you have too many other deadlines you are working on.

In some cases the person has thought their request out already and can give more details about what they really want, but in other cases they don’t know because they have an end goal, but no details and no milestones in mind. Even with seemingly simple research requests, the end goal may require that some milestones or boundaries need to be established before research begins. For instance perhaps you were like me and wanted to identify the parents of Nancy Orr. Nancy was believed to be dead before 1850. She married in 1806 or 1810 in Kentucky and her husband appears in census records in Logan County, Kentucky in 1810 and 1820 and in Pike County, Illinois in 1830. Nancy appears as the head of household in 1840 in Pike County. The census information taken all together placed her birth date sometime between 1780 and 1784, but no place is recorded. The request for Nancy’s parents is a simple request until you realize that there are not going to be any death records, no birth records, and there is no parental information in the marriage record because the only copy of the marriage record still extant is an index entry recorded before the original records were destroyed. Now to find Nancy’s parents there are many methodologies I could employ, but the research is not simple by any means. In fact, having already spent over 100 hours on researching Nancy and her probable family I have located some great circumstantial evidence for Nancy’s parentage, but no document that establishes absolute proof. If Nancy was on your family tree you might not be prepared to spend hundreds of hours on researching her parents. You would need to set some boundaries, but you would also need to understand the complications in the research that make this a less than simple research request. In this case, identifying Nancy’s parents to you might be like hanging Christmas lights right now is for me.

On the flip side, communicating only small goals to your researcher can sometimes be a wall to reaching your broader goals. A client requested that we locate the marriage of an ancestor for her in the 1700s in Sweden, but after some research it appeared, based on the records that the marriage record was not extant. This was disappointing to the client. In discussing it with her, we later found out that she wanted the marriage record, but she ultimately wanted to push those ancestral lines back further. She believed that the marriage record was the key to pushing the line back, which it was not. Although the search for the marriage record was the next logical step in her research, the absence of the record was not the dead end she had supposed. We had proof that the couple was married, without the marriage record, and we even had an approximate marriage date, that could be established by other records. Likewise, the parentage could be established using other records. In my analogy I would have to equate this scenario with never hanging Christmas lights in the future because I forgot to pack them in the move and they got left at our old home. If at first you don’t succeed there may be other paths to your destination.

Moving from one place to another sounds so simple until you sit down and make a list of exactly everything that needs to be done and when it needs to be done and then start trying to do it. If I had hired professional movers and cleaners, and painters I’m sure I would probably miss out on just how complex coordinating and accomplishing everything might be. My husband has missed out on just how much time and effort has gone into this move because he hasn’t been there for much of it, so he’s asking about hanging Christmas lights while I’m still just trying to meet necessary deadlines. I find this situation is similar to working with clients sometimes. When we’re not the one on the ground doing the work we can find it difficult to understand why the Christmas lights aren’t hung. This frustration can be avoided to some extent by communicating your goals and expectations with your researcher and in return truly listening to what is necessary to achieve those goals and expectations and being aware that sometimes things do not work out exactly as planned or hoped. While I would love to surprise my husband with Christmas lights, I think he now agrees that Christmas will be much more enjoyable if there is a working toilet in the new house.